Unofficial news and tips about Google

September 20, 2007

Google Shared Stuff

Google's social side is more visible every day. A new service called "Shared Stuff" lets you share interesting links with your friends and the entire world. You need to drag a bookmarklet to your browser's link bar or to click on the "Share" button from a web page (the button can only be found at Google Video right now).

When you click on the button, a new window pops out and you can choose between posting the page to your profile, emailing it to your contacts or bookmarking the page using services like del.icio.us or furl.

A profile page is public and can include information about yourself, a photo, links to your sites. You can select the photo from one of your public Picasa Web Albums. Here's the profile of Kevin Marks, a former Technorati engineer who now works at Google.

This page lets you see the latest web pages shared by your Gmail contacts:

There's also a page that lists all the popular items shared by Google users, but some of them are questionable (I saw pages that only had a single view):

You can also subscribe to feeds for all of these pages, but it would be nice to have a special feed for your contacts and gadget that keeps you up-to-date.

Overall, the service adds the social component to Google Bookmarks and integrates a lot of ways to share content online. It will be interesting to see if Google manages to build a community around the new service and if you can rely on it to find and disseminate what's cool on the web. Google will probably allow you to add the "Share" button to your site so you can replace all the bookmarking/sharing buttons for del.icio.us, Digg, Facebook etc. and provide a better experience to your users.

This is probably the first appearance of the Moka-Moka social project and Google will include shared information from other services (Picasa Web Albums, public events from your calendar, Google Reader's shared items or public Google Docs).

Thanks for the post. I checked this out. I liked the feature you didn't write about: besides sharing to Google Stuff, also be able to share stuff to del.icio.us and others in a few extra clicks. Refer to infoarch for more.

I'd sure like to see a recommendation engine here. If they are down with integrating with Del.icio.us and Furl, I bet they could do some really awesome things in terms of cross service user and item recommendations. Also, I presume we can have cached copies of saved pages here. Lots of potential, for goodness sake.

There are a number of sites out there that offer similar services. This one looks most similar to http://www.siphs.com, i.e. bookmark for yourself, share via email with others, and have a public place for people to browse your links. Nothing new, and better services do exist.

I couldn't get it to work with Firefox. First, I had to disable single window mode (TabMix Plus option) and allow pop-ups open in their own window. Once it popped up, it said transferring data from Google for over a minute, and was practically non-responsive. I gave up after that, but it looks pretty cool.

This looks like an experiment that's somehow on live - for that's surely what it is?

I still miss the avalanche of product launches from 2005-2006, so any live experiment from Google is a great opportunity to see what they're up to. I remember that Larry Page or Sergey Brin said that Google needs to simplify the way you share stuff with other people. For example, Google Video, Picasa Web and Google Docs have different options and interfaces for sharing files. The new Share button could bring a common language across Google's properties and maybe other sites too.

Yes, you're right. This thing is very similar to Bzzster (OK, maybe Google has a better name). There's also a bookmarklet, the dialog is similar, but Bzzster doesn't have an address book and a way to see shared pages from your contacts.

Anyway, most social bookmarking sites have bookmarklets that trigger pop-up windows, so you can't say Bzzster invented this.

Probably Google took some features from other bookmarking sites when designing this tool, but nobody claimed this is a big innovation.

I only wish that the shared stuff page would allow you to go back in & edit what you have posted ( spelling errors, etc... ).Also, when sending a link to others, it would be nice to have the bcc option.I'd also like to see shared stuff incorporated into the toolbar.

I'm not impressed with "Google Shared Stuff" at all. The service does not work with Firefox (or it did not for me.) I had to change my security setting in IE to low and still with it set low, it blocked several sites I was attempting to share. I then changed my setting to accept all cookies and it still would not work.

Oh come on, Bzzzster didn't invent this, and there are several others out there. The thing that this does right is that it will grab a summary for you automatically (or not) and you can add your own comments too. If you then choose to Share this item in google reader your friends who subscribe to that feed will also get your commentary if you added it, which of course is half the point I think.

This is a great idea, but it needs some improvement. Where do the links prior to the last ten shared go? Why doesn't the email function work? None of my addressees have received the links I have forwarded using this tool.

I would really like this feature if it actually worked.

Keep it up, Google! I like so many of the other tools you've developed!

WHY, WHY WHY after all this time, is there still no display for anything beyond the last ten (10)shared items??? Come ON already! Interestingly however, when you re-post something THE ORIGINAL COMMENTARY IS THERE AGAIN! Unfortunately, there is still no way to edit the comments on even the shared items that are still actually showing. Hey come ON Google, chop chop! I'll have to have a talk with my friend's tenant who is some little big shot at the company. You know what they say, once on Google, GMAIL or cached on the web, it's there FOREVER. *** Somewhat creepy documentary on Google, its practices and culture here:

Seems to work OK in Firefox 3.0.5 but I agree that the opening in new windows is messy. Found this feature quite by chance and then had some difficulty finding any info about it (made the mistake of Googling for "Google share" rather than "Google sharing").

Baffling! Have just tried it again, to try sharing one of my public Google notebooks and it asked me to sign in to Google in French! Did that and I got another Google sign in redirect (pl - Polish?) but the page was blank. Checked the sharing preview and it was trying to share a site in a different tab in Firefox rather than the one with the Notebook open in it!Liz